Washed Ashore
A wet feather prodded his face. Garbled voices ground against his ears as sand ground against his back and shoulders, cold water lapping around him.
Everything hurt. Everything. A sea of deep aches and throbbing pain that oversaturated every muscle and bone within him.
A hand brushed away the feather and gently patted the side of his face, trying to nudge him from the uncomfortable sleep he hid within.
He groaned, rolling his head to the side for escape. Water filled his ear, pushed against his cheek, saltiness slipping in the corner of his mouth and biting at his raw throat. He coughed.
And now the coughing wouldn’t stop.
“It’s okay. Get it out,” a soft voice soothed. Small hands lifted his head from the water, while steady, calloused hands rolled him onto his side.
His shoulder blades filled with stabbing fire, spreading down his arms with razor sharp slashes. His back arched as he coughed and sputtered, though the hands held him gently.
The coughing subsided. He forced his eyes open.
Frizzy grey curls surrounded the face leaning over him, laugh lines deepening around her mouth and eyes as she smiled, one hand on his shoulder, the other against his chest. “There we go. Just breath.”
“Momma?” a young voice said hesitantly above his head.
“Shhh. One thing at a time.”
Scattered memories washed through his sea soaked mind. The blinding sun overhead. Wind sharp and delightful against his face. The dark grip of captivity loosening as he pushed himself harder. Higher.
Urgency crashed over him. Run.
He fought to sit up. The woman helped, steadying him as the whole world sloshed and spun, his stomach churning.
Gulls called overhead. White foam danced across the blue-grey sand as waves rolled in and out. He twisted, finding dark cliffs looming in the fog behind them, gnarled trees clinging within the crevices. A carved stairway cut up through the cliffs.
Run.
“I need to…” he croaked, the voice that came out of him nothing like his own. He tried to push up, the course sand biting into his feet and hands. But his wet clothes drug him down, and the woman caught him as he fumbled.
“Momma.” A little girl scooted backwards across the sand, eyes wide.
“It’s okay, Rhea. He’s just confused. And probably a bit frightened.”
The stabbing fire bit again and he reached instinctively for his bare shoulder, his tingling fingers finding a mess of raw skin and mangled texture that his mind couldn’t understand.
“But, Momma. Why does he have feathers?”
He looked down.
Stripped and broken feathers trailed his arms, anchored in his skin by a dark crust that that had once been pale wax. His chest collapsed.
“No. Nooo,” he groaned, scraping at the grotesque texture, pain wracking his arms. Panic flooded the edges of his mind, a chaos of confusion swirling deeper within him. Run. Run! He had to get the feathers off. If they saw, they would know it was him. They would take him back!
But the feathers wouldn’t come, the darkened wax fused with his skin, his nails unable to claw it away.
The woman grabbed his hands.
“Be still. Still. Hush,” she whispered firmly, fighting to stop him. “There now. We’ll get you cleaned up. But you can’t do that.”
A small sob broke from him.
The waves hissed across the rocky shore, wind shuffling the trees on the cliffs, the world breathing around him. His own breath found its rhythm with it.
Run, his mind hissed, but it was just a whisper now.
The woman gave his hands a light squeeze. “What’s your name, young man?”
…run…
Yet, as he opened his mouth with a lie on his tongue, he looked up, finding that which he didn’t expect within her lined face. Kindness. Sorrow. Patience.
It was foreign. So different from faces that had watched over him for years; the anger and rage, the calculating sneers, the haunting fear, the wicked grins. Different, even from his father. And his soul begged to embrace it.
“I… Icarus.”
Flash fiction by S. M. Jake, fantasy short story, Icarus retelling,